Catholic Church doesn't impose abortion views

Published 1:00 am, Saturday, March 14, 2009

Ethical advances in human rights are realized when people pass from being perceived as "property" to being seen for what they are: human beings possessing their own dignity. It's true that often religious visionaries perceive this before the rest of society catches up.

Throughout history, people could kill slaves because slaves were "property" of their owners. Over 400 years at least eight popes spoke forcefully against slavery (Urban VIII prohibited it in 1639), and it took Protestant abolitionists to end it.

The Conquistadores saw the indigenous people of America as "property" to be enslaved. It was
Dominican Friar Francisco di Vitoria
who argued otherwise, laying the groundwork for indigenous rights.

Believers stood against America's eugenics craze: the pro-eugenics 1927
Supreme Court
ruled that the "feeble-minded" could be sterilized against their will, the one dissenter being the lone Catholic justice.

Martin Luther King
's full writings -- not sanitized versions -- show the strong religious belief at the heart of the civil rights movement.

This doesn't mean that ethics are solely religious -- or only religious people could be ethical! Instead, they are a matter of reason.

The ancient Hippocratic Oath opposed abortion; still, many continued to see the unborn as the "property" of the mother, nothing more than a "part" of her body, a "clump of tissue."

It took 20th century science to reveal the unique DNA in each intra-uterine human person.

The answer to the new and pressing human rights frontier of intra-uterine life is for the community to provide all the support it possibly can for both the mother and the child. This is not an "imposition" of religion, but a proposal to once again extend the boundaries of ethics to encompass those once seen as "property."